


The Affectionullificator (or You’re Beautiful That Way)

by TheOvidians



Category: OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes
Genre: F/M, Fluff, cheer you up story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 09:43:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14329731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOvidians/pseuds/TheOvidians
Summary: Being around 16 years old now, Dendy and K.O. enjoy their pretty normal high school life, but one day Dendy seems to be unsually upset about something. While mercilessly destroying some potatoes as her test subjects, K.O. tries to find out what bothers her.This is a short story about first love and love not always working out the way you hope it would. It's for all those peeps out there who might not have received the love they wanted and might need a K.O. from time to time to cheer them up =)





	The Affectionullificator (or You’re Beautiful That Way)

K.O. knew something was wrong when the third potato disintegrated while Dendy let out a cry in growing frustration.  
“Poor Mr. Potato the Third.” he signed, shaking his head.  
Dendy’s furious glance, which she threw at him from the other side of the table hurt almost physical, so he decided it was better to focus on his homework than offering useless comments. Ever since they started high school, they met at Dendy’s secret lab (somehow she managed to recreate the very same one she had in elementary school) to finish their homework together. But Dendy being...well...Dendy, she naturally finished her assignments way ahead of him and usually worked on one of her own projects. He could technically just copy her answer but K.O. refused to cheat like that. Cheating to get to the answers quicker didn’t sound very heroic after all.  
As he tried to solve the last math problem for today another potato imploded and joined his potato-friends in potato-heaven. He was about to express his condolence for this sacrifice in the name of science when Dendy cut him short with a tone as sharp as a cutting knife:  
“Your displaced empathy is not appreciated, K.O.”  
She was already setting up a fifth one and readjusted the laser with which she had annihilated his potato brethren. The laser had an insane number of cables strapped around and blinked in different colours in diverse places. Sensing that another potato-related comment would bring him into real trouble, he leaned back on his chair, tied up his naturally chaotic hair again (he had replaced his old hairstyle with a common plait recently) and asked as nonchalantly as possible:  
“What are you working on, Dendy?”  
“Something that is refusing to work and it drives me crazy.”  
She rolled up the sleeves of her jeans-jumpsuit and began rummaging in the technical insides of her new project.  
Dendy could get really passionate about her inventions, but in all those years K.O. knew her he probably had never seen her this aggressive towards an experiment.  
Something was definitely up, he thought again, looked down at his still unsolved math problem and decided that the numbers won’t go anywhere (and were also not threatening innocent potatoes) and closed his textbook.  
“Want to talk about it?” he tried with his most innocent voice.  
“No.” Her answer was like a quick shot fired almost immediately after he had finished the question.  
“Are the potatoes supposed to disintegrate or implode or…?”  
“No.”  
“Is this laser intended to defend against…”  
“No.”  
“I didn’t even finish my question!”  
“You were going to ask if this laser is against invasions of giant potatoes.”  
Bullseye.  
K.O. had no idea how to counter her, so he went quiet for a few minutes. Rocking his chair back- and forwards, he simply watched as Dendy ripped out cables, hammered on metal and torched new parts together like a mad scientist, who is building his own Frankenstein’s monster.  
When the bright noon sun turned into a more subtle orange outside, he finally settled on his next strategy, stood up and casually walked up to her. She ignored him and continued working with her back to him. K.O. waited for several seconds before letting himself simply fall towards Dendy like an oversized blanket. She almost gave in under his sudden weight and he forced her on her knees.  
“K.O., what are you doing? You are crushing me!” Her voice trembled from the effort to not completely be buried under him.  
“It’s not my fault! I suddenly can’t move my body anymore, if not for you I would have fallen face down!” he protested, while he tried not to giggle.  
“Oh yeah? And why has your body stopped working all of sudden?”  
Dendy hold tight on two cables from her laser, otherwise she would have lost to K.O.’s weight and the laws of gravity by now.  
“I’m suffering from a serious case of ‘curiosity-ties’.”  
“That’s not a real thing.”  
“Of course, it is! It’s a real sickness and the only cure is to tell me why you are so angry today and why you try to incinerate all these potatoes.”  
Dendy slightly turned her head and their eyes were so close they almost touched the other. K.O. grinned with each second he could feel Dendy giving in an inch more.  
“Your turbonic form is shining through, you know.” she said matter-of-factly und K.O. could feel that his grin had indeed seemed a tad menacing. He changed his expression to a neutral smile.  
Dendy turned her head away again, mumbled incomprehensibly (K.O. could have sworn to hear the word ‘insufferable’ several times) and until she finally said in a quiet voice.  
“I’m trying to build an affectionullificator.”  
“An affilonullifetor?” He tried to repeat the word but failed like with most of the names she gave her creations.  
“Affection-ull-i-ficator!” she repeated, more pronounced this time and added:  
“Can you get off of me, please!”  
With his thoughts still on the confusing name, K.O. had almost forgot that he had still been in progress of turning her into Dendy-mush.  
“Oh! Yeah, sorry.”  
He sat down on the floor and Dendy, already on her knees due to K.O.’s sudden attack, sat down opposite to him.  
“To be precise, I am trying to build a laser to erase...specific kinds of emotions. The potatoes have the purpose to make sure that I don’t accidentally erase something else.” she explained.  
“Like destroy a person instead of their emotions?”  
“Yes,” she hesitantly admitted.  
“But what do you mean with specific kinds of emotions? Do you mean stuff like sadness or anger?”  
Even after getting the answers he had demanded, K.O. felt as confused as before.  
“It’s more complicated than that, K.O.”  
Growing anxious, Dendy picked up a wrench, stood up and continued her tinkering. He feared she would fell silent, but then she raised her voice again.  
“I mean, it is certainly a blend of negative emotions, like…”  
K.O. was pretty sure he had never witnessed Dendy wringing for the right words as she did at this moment.  
“It is a sort of regret, but not the kind you can overcome by realizing your mistake. More like the kind that leaves you empty with no idea what to do next.”  
Ever since they were kids, he was used to Dendy’s voice having this mechanical, monotone touch to it. There was nothing left of that. Her tone went up and down, words coming out of her mouth in irregular instances.  
“That sounds horrible! Who is feeling like that? Do I know them, too?”  
K.O. already had this stone laying at the bottom of his stomach, a sensation that came from him knowing the answer to his question but he was still hoping that his intuition would prove wrong.  
The wrench in her hand stopped, maybe she wasn’t even aware of that.  
“The laser is for myself.”  
What is a hero good for if he can’t handle situations like this? Even after years of training and working under some of the greatest heroes of his time, K.O. still felt helpless while it dawned to him that his best friend was deeply hurt. As if in trance, Dendy began hitting the laser with her wrench leaving in the process, slowly but surely, a small dent in the metal. She didn’t want to say these things out loud and yet, she couldn’t stop herself from continuing.  
“I am an idiot, K.O. I miscalculated everything and now things can’t go back to normal.”  
He was certain that he heard under the hammering sounds faint, humanly sobs. Dendy never cried, she was that kind of strong person.  
He got up with a jump and feeling completely lost in the situation he did the only thing he could think of and hugged her tightly from behind. This time she didn’t need to fight against his weight, he hold on to her. It gave her the necessary support to continue:  
“I told him. I told Rad how I feel. I told him that I had a crush on him for all these years. I should have expected his answer, but I told him anyway.”  
Of course, he had known how Dendy felt for his friend and co-worker. Of course, he had noticed how happy she always was to tag along, to be near him even if Rad had never noticed. What he hadn’t expected was this outcome, was seeing one of his friends like this.  
Some of Dendy’s tears landed on his arms, they were warm and they were like acid, like something toxic that shouldn’t exist.  
“He never saw me that way. I was always just a child to him. A smart child he respected but still just…”  
Laying all her frustration into the swing she again hit her machine with the wrench and almost destroyed the laser with the impact.  
K.O. wanted to tell her how sorry he felt for her, how he was in great pain because she was in even greater pain. But he doubted that would do her any good. They usually don’t need to say these things out loud, they went without saying. He realized that what Dendy needed right now was not some simple words of consolidation. No, she needed the truth.  
“That’s what you want to erase? How you felt about Rad?” he asked.  
A nod.  
“You know that I think you are the smartest person on earth, right?”  
Another nod.  
“Because this is the stupidest idea you ever had!”  
Dendy was so surprised she even forgot she had been uncontrollably sobbing just a second ago.  
“Excuse me?”  
He supported his head on her shoulder before he answered and rubbed his head against her cheeks.  
“Think about it! All this time you spend with him and with us. All your effort to come up with the best inventions just to impress him. Everything that you GAINED from being in love with him, it would be all lost too, right?”  
K.O. couldn’t see Dendy’s expression, but her face turned wide-eyed with surprise.  
“I...never thought about it this way.” she admitted, but immediately after, her body hair stood up by the thought of the embarrassment she had felt after her confession.  
“It still hurts, though. And it’s not something I can fix with the proper medical procedure.”  
He could feel how she gave in in his embrace like a sack of vegetables.  
“Of course you can’t, dum-dum.”  
Now it was Dendy who was almost falling over. He added hastily:  
“But take this from someone who literally locked half of his personality away in a cage. You can’t suppress your emotions, nor can you erase them like you just tried. You probably would have exploded or something like that, anyway. The best thing you can do is confront them. Again and again.”  
“And then what?”  
“You accept them!”  
With these words he tightened his grip around her waist, lifted her several inches off the ground and began spinning her in circles.  
There were still tears hanging in the edges of her eyelids and her face was red and swollen but she laughed while she was flying around as if she was in a one-man carousel.  
“Stop it! Or I will use the laser on you next!” she cried. Her threat lost all its impact due to her constant giggling.  
“Oh yeah, I wonder what might happen to me. Maybe I will implode like Lord Potato the Fourth.” he returned sheepishly.  
“How many times have I told you to stop sympathizing with the potatoes!”  
They couldn’t stop laughing while K.O. turned Dendy around and around until they both needed to catch their breaths and he finally released her from his grip.  
Just when they could breathe normally again, they bursted out into laughter and it was without any lingering pain and pure and liberating.  
“Starting tomorrow, coming to the bodega will be awkward.” Dendy said after a while, her face was still crowned by a natural smile.  
“Maybe,” K.O. admitted and picked up the wrench she had dropped during her ride. “But it’s a place filled with weird people living weird lives, so what else is new?”  
He tossed her the equipment and she caught it with ease. She examined the wrench in her hand. Dendy didn’t simply feel happy, her regrets were still there, lingering in the back of her messed-up insides.  
“You are right,” she said as she uncapped a black pencil and wrote “REJECTED” on what was left of her laser.  
“Those feelings are now a part of me that don’t deserve to be destroyed like this.”  
After blowing her nose and failing to completely dry her face and clothes, she wore a determined smile. K.O. answered with a similar expression.  
She threw one last look at her failed experiment, pondering about this and that.  
While K.O. put his books and pencils into his bag, Dendy realized that her hair had been a mess after her involuntary K.O.-carousel ride.  
“You know, I even grew out my hair for him. Based on some empiric data I believed he prefered women with long hair. Even though it was a very inefficient choice. Maybe I will ask Mr. Logic to cut them for me.”  
Along with her words, she tried to brush through her hair with her hands in an hopeless attempt to straighten them.  
“It’s a shame though.” He looked up, examined her for a second and nodded with a bright smile.  
“‘Cause I think you are beautiful that way.”


End file.
